
,0 







DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, 

BDEEAU OF EDUCATION. 



BUILDING 

FOE THE 

CHILDREN IN THE SOUTI 



Bureau of Education, 

Washington, December, 1884. 
The educational labors of Rev. A. D. Mayo in different parts of the country are among 
those which have proved most effective and have been most widely appreciated. His 
addresses on education in the South during the last four years have been most beneficial 
in reviving the interests of education in that section, and have been called for there and 
wherever there is an interest in the success of the cause in that portion of the country. 
The accompanying is one of Mr. Mayo's most recent and comprehensive addresses, and 
I have deemed it expedient to extend the sphere of its usefulness by distributing it as 
one of the publications of this Office, and thereby answering many demands. 

JOHN EATON, 

Commissioner. 



WASHINGTON: 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 

1884. 
S065 c s 



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BUILDING FOR THE CHILDREN IN THE SOUTH. 

r purpose, under the title "Building lor the Children in the South," to give the results 
of a four years' careful observation through the States beyond the Potomac and the Ohio 
concerning the most practical and effective way of establishing 

THE AMERICAN .SYSTEM OF EDUCATION. 

By the American system of education, I mean not one kind of schools exclusively, but 
all good schooling that has been found valuable in our country. The American system 
of education means, first and foremost, the free common school for all children, supported 
by public taxation, administered by experts who are chosen by the people (in public ed- 
ucation, as in government, the final court of appeal in this Republic); the free secondary, 
normal, technical, and higher education, held as a matter of undoubted public right, to 
be exercised in every State according to a high educational expediency, of which the peo- 
ple are the final judge, both elementary and superior public schools being kept as near 
the people in their local capacity asis consistent with efficient administration: even State 
supervision being confined to things that are general and essential, and national aid in- 
vited only at the most critical points, withthesole purpose to stimulate local effort, with 
no assumption of national supervision or control. 

Of course, public education, thus defined, has its general function in the elementary 
training of mind, discipline of character, and imparling of common information which 
every wise man knows are essential to the humblest citizen and the loftiest statesman 
alike. 

Of the six millions of American children and youth actually in daily attendance and 
the ten millions loosely enrolled in public and the three hundred thousand in private 
schools, nine-tenths will certainly turn their backs upou the school-house door as early 
as the age of fourteen. The first and ever-present concern in the American system is to 
do the best thing possible for these millions of children whose average school life to-day 
in the East does not exceed six, in the West five, or in the South three full school years. 
In the secondary, higher, industrial, and normal departments, which deal with the few 
hundred thousand youth in training for educational and social leadership, the common 
school has its right, which the people have unmistakably confirmed in every American 
State. But, in this upper region of education, the people invite the cooperation of every 
effective school. There is ample field for the display of individual genius, of corporate 
enterprise, of home and neighborhood training. And here the church, of every commun- 
ion, has a field of operation so broad and exacting that it may well limit its efforts to 
what it can never half include and provoke no conflict with the people on that field where 
the people are bound to have their way, whoever goes to the wall: the maintenance, at 
public expense, of the free elementary school, open to every child, unsectarian in relig- 
ion though profoundly moral and religious in the grain, unpartisan in politics, knowing 
no distinction of race or sex or social condition, the people's university of American citi- 
zenship for every American child. 

More and more is it coming to be understood by all competent and patriotic thinkers 
that there is no necessary conflict of interests between these different methods of achiev- 
ing the great result, since the most exclusive private or parochial school in our country 
must finally adjust itself to the conditions of our peculiar American life. And it will 
be a national calamity if, in the lace of the invading host of illiteracy now marching in 
soli'l rank to capture the public life of every American city and State, the champions 
of the various departments of school life permit themselves to be drawn into a side 
quarrel that shall for a moment divert the attention of the people from the one Ameri- 



can question that towers immeasurably above all present issues of church ami slate: 
What shall we do with that American barbarism which, disguised under any deceptive 
title, is the same hateful thing, in New Orleans or in Boston, in the wilds of the mounts 
ains or the slums of the metropolis, in the blanket of the cowboy or under the dress coat 
of the senator, the implacable foe of everything which every true American holds essen- 
tial to the existence of the foremost Republic in the world? 

I propose to tell how, under the present conditions, the whole people of the South, 
within the present generation, can fairly and firmly place on the ground this American sys- 
tem of education ; lor I hold that if the people of these sixteen States, with all the help that 
Providence may vouchsafe, in a long generation, can establish their final system of educa- 
tion, which shall be developed as the yearsgo on, it will havcdone the greatest work for 
the children ever yet accomplished in Christendom. And in this ' ' Building for the Chil- 
dren" 1 do not appear as an outside architect, flourishing an ideal plan or insisting 
upon any local excellence of home or foreign celebrity. Indeed, I shall speak of nothing 
which has nut been actually trial, with complete success, under average conditions, in some 
part of Hi'- S mthland. So my discourse will only be an honesteffort to voice the achieve- 
ments of southern school men comparing notes and cheering each other around the cor- 
ner of the mighty structure now rising under their hands. I only presume to wield the 
baton of the orchestra while it plays an overture which is but a series of variations on 
this one theme, every strain and note caught and fixed in the score as it has floated in 
from the solitary music breathed into the ear of some little child. 

THE AWAKENING OF THE PEOPLE. 

The first condition of success in our Southern States is a great and general awakening 
of all classes of the southern people to the appalling dangers of the illiteracy revealed, 
though half concealed, by the startling figures of the national census of 1880; for, until 
the whole people of the South honestly face this condition, there can be no general or 
very effective development of educational reform. The superior class of the southern 
people, during the past fifteen years, under circumstances that would have appalled any 
but an American people, have put in operation, in every State, a sufficient system of 
public schools and have reconstructed and enlarged their old system of the secondary 
and higher education. And I say here, if need be in the face of disparagement from over 
the line, that no body of superior people, so few in numbers, so overwhelmed in the work 
of rebuilding society from the wreck of civil war, has anywhere made an effort so heroic, 
with such a hopeful outlook, as this people of whom I speak. This year the sixteen 
States, once known as southern, will spend not less than fifteen millions of dollars upon 
the education of their children, and in every State there will be a positive gain in every 
department of educational life. 

But everybody kuows that this is only the beginning, and is, at best, so painfully in- 
adequate to compass the result that it were well to waste no time in congratulations, but 
press onward to the more difficult work of a great awakening of the whole people of the South. 
For here is the cause of the imperfect working, sometimes the discouraging failure, of the 
best plans of ' ' building for the children. ' ' In every community there are men of wealth 
and influence not yet really awakened to this mighty necessity of the people. There are 
too many reasonably prosperous and respectable parents only concerned for their own 
children, not even intelligently informed of their demands. And there is the mighty 
army of those to whom education is yet only a vague name — at best a name to charm 
with — who either care nothing for the school or abuse it by ignorant interference with 
everything wisely done therein. Now, in Europe, the method of dealing with such a 
situation would be for a centralized government to mature a plan, enact a law, place the 
expert in the school room and the policeman at the father's elbow, and enforce suah ele- 
mentary instruction as it should deem expedient for a state governed by itself. But I 
need not say this is not the American, especially is not the Southern American, way in 



which any good thing can be done. Nowhere in our country has a group of eminent 
people so great influence for good as still in the South; but, ai'ter all, its power is only 
moral and its implement is only agitation. If anybody in those States is deluding him- 
self with the fancy that an effective system of schools for the masses can, in any way, be 
forced upon, smuggled into, or insinuated among the people without their full consent 
and hearty cooperation, his disenchantment is only a question of time. Anybody can 
lead the horse to water, but all the world can't force the horse to drink unless he is dry. 
Only when this great mass of ignorance and indifference at the bottom of every State is 
agitated, upheaved, and moved to its deepest depths, can anything effective be accom- 
plished in such a mighty work as I outline. Until this is done our southern school life, 
from the plantation primary to the University of Virginia, will be a vessel tossed on the 
stormy waves of a treacherous sea. As this is accomplished, all schools will improve, 
superior teachers will come into demand, and, iu a thousand ways now deemed impossi- 
ble, money will flow in to help the building rise towards heaven. 

This great awakening cannot be achieved, to any large extent, by laborers from with- 
out, but is the proper work of the whole superior class at home. Every State has its 
own favorite way of raising a popular breeze. Every popular device not absolutely un- 
suited to the case should be brought into requisition for the next ten years to arouse the 
people. The leading press of every Southern State is now doing splendid service, and 
only needs to be told to keep on doing the same thing, a little harder, every week. Every 
county , village, secular, and religious newspaper should be "roped in" and made to blaze 
with the best columns that the ablest friend of the children can indite. The pulpit should 
be summoned to speak out in unmistakable tones for that general enlightenment, 
without which every church becomes a dark cave of superstition, where contentious 
Christians squabble over dry bones of non-essentials, knowing not the light of that love 
which is the "fulfilling of the law." Every candidate for public office, from President 
down to policeman, should be compelled to face the people and tell "what he knows 
about" education. It will be "mighty" convenient, twenty years hence, forthe young 
lawyers aud ambitious young men of the South to be able to pull out of their pockets a 
"ringing speech" in behalf of the boys and girls who will then pass in the ballots that 
decide their political fate. And if great statesmen pose and ponder in uncertainty, and 
mighty doctors have no opinions, and the stars of fashion ' ' have no use ' ' for themes so 
commonplace as education in their drawing rooms, then let every earnest man and woman, 
e\ery eager school boy and girl come to the front to plead, " in season and out of season," 
for the children. And if all other devices fail, perhaps the Lord of Light will inspire even 
gouty, grizzly, ragged old Uncle Remus to climb the nearest rail fence and give his last 
shout, " God bress cle little children in de schools." 

I know of what I speak when I say that the inward ear of the South is now awaiting 
this mighty call, all ready to respond. Why, even I, a stranger from the far-off land of 
snowdrifts and east wind, a man of whom nobody had heard, with only a hundred dollars 
in my pocket and nothing in my carpet-bag but the new education, have been welcomed 
through the length and breadth of the great Southern Empire in a way almost unheard 
of in the annals of American educational life. I have found no crowd of colored folk so 
humble that they did not hearken like quiet children while I have talked of the bless- 
ings of education. The most frisky colony of small boys on the front seat of the opera- 
house becomes my most receptive audience as soon as they find out I am talking for 
them. The wisest of southern men come to find out if I have any key to unlock any 
educational gate now closed. The best people in a hundred villages tramp through win- 
ter mud and storm to encourage my familiar talk. The only drawback to my ministry 
is the fact that I know so little of what I speak ; am a man of sixty, who lost my con- 
stitution forty years ago and am now living on the few remaining by-laws ; cannot be in 
a hundred places at once, correspond with every teacher, and be the friend of every 
smart boy and darling little girl between the Potomac and the Rio Grande. I go to a 
town of ten thousand people, and find the largest assembly hall thrown open, at noon- 



day, crowded with school children and their teachers ; the gallery a rainbow of pretty 
girls from the neighboring academy ; the leading men of the city on the platform ; all 
hungry and thirsty for the gospel according to the children. I arn invited to ud edu- 
cational barbecue, where, after the mighty roast is consumed, the .people gat her in solid 
mass around the most convenient stump, and close my hour of talk with a resolve 
to "go the whole hog" for education. I stand in a college chapel, twenty years ago a 
hospital and a fortress on the battleground in the rear of Vicksburg, the old port holes 
yet remaining in its dilapidated window shutters, the house crowded with the young 
people of two great schools, the sons and daughters of the men we were fighting then, 
now cheering every patriotic word as lustily as a music hall full of Boston boys and 
girls. Now if I, a stranger and nobody in particular, can do these things, what cannot 
the foremost men of the South, in this home of eloquence, what cannot these women before 
whose social power we all doff our hats, achieve, if once moved by the spirit of the Lord, 
as workers in this great revival for the awakening of the people in the supreme cause of 
"building for the children?" Surel.v, a people so magnetic, susceptible, enthusiastic, 
and irresistible as this, one need not entreat to come forth once more in its might in 
behalf of those who are dearer than life The country wants the South not otherwise 
than as God made it and the providential schooling of the past has left it, and only de- 
mands that its people shall give themselves, just as they are, in their own best way, to 
this glorious crusade for light and love. Let South Carolina go on "eating fire ; " only 
follow her splendid schoolmaster, Governor Thomson, eating fire in behalf of education. 
Let the whole South become "solid" for the children, and it shall become the corner 
"stone that cannot be broken," on which shall rise the temple of liberty seen in vision 
by the fathers, still the dearest hope of all her worthy daughters and patriotic sons. 

LOCAL TAXATION FOB EDUCATION. 

The second condition of success in "building for the children "is to thoroughly arouse 
and inform thepul/lic mind on the radical importance of general local taxation for the support 
of schools. The average man always finds it difficult to take up one good thing without 
dropping another. Our Southern States, for the next generation, need every agency for 
the support of schools, individual, corporate, local, and State, with all the aid that the 
National Government can be induced to give. But it is very important that the people 
should know where the real, pinch must finally come, and who can justly be held responsi- 
ble for the success or failure of their new education. A community that buttons up its 
own pocket and waits for private beneficence, State or national aid, to educate its chil- 
dren, will certainly be disappointed and remain in ignorance. So, whatever may be our 
individual opinion on the supplementary aids for the public school, all thoughtful men 
must agree in this, that the burden must finally be shouldered by the community whose chil- 
dren are taught in the schools. 

I know the uncertain ground on which I tread when I press home this point of local 
taxation. One of the most painful signs of ignorance and selfishness in public affairs is 
the prevalence of the notion that taxation, at best, is disguised despotism and the com- 
munity that gets off with the least is most to be congratulated. The most fruitful field 
for the demagogue is a community demoralized by this fallacy, for he has only to raise 
the cry of " reduction of taxes" to carry a majority of deluded people, who, to save on 
the tax bill, will put the knife to the throat of every sacred interest and willingly drift 
back to barbarism. The poorest speculation in financial affairs is to knock out the brains of a 
community to save money. The American idea is that taxation is a voluntary assessment 
of the people, according to their ability, to pay for things indispensable to the existence 
and progress of the community. And wisdom in public finance consists in taxing most 
generously for the most radical public necessity. The State or community that taxes 
bravely and amply for public education will find itself more and more relieved from the 
thousand perils of public dishonesty, public corruption, and the hateful charge f>r crime 



and pauperism, and the manifold cnrses that, like a flock of buzzards, hover over an igno- 
rant people. 

Whatever may be our theory of public finance, it must be evident that the one place 
where local taxation can be most forcibly urged is in behalf of the children. All men give 
money freely for what they love best; and surely the school tax should have in it most 
of the heart and mind of the people. There may be reasonable doubt concerning the 
outcome of expenditure for many objects of public concern, but no competent man for 
a moment will question the wisdom of the most generous investment in that education 
which is the development of power and the training of every kind of ability that will 
insure the highest prosperity of every sort in the years to come ; for public money wisely 
expended in a good school is money loaned to the one creditor who always pays, who in- 
herits what we must leave, to whose charge must be committed everything for which 
men toil, suffer, and fight in this world. The real treasury of every commonwealth, of 
any city or county therein, is the child. Every thing, at last, depends on our success in 
making him intelligent, industrious, refined, and good. The character of a town, a 
county, a generation hence, is the character we pay for by what we give to the upper story 
of the child to-day. To leave him in mental and moral darkness, ignorant, superstitious, 
brutal, quarrelsome, and shut up to his own little narrow life, is the surest way on earth to 
blight the community to which he belongs. So every dollar wisely expended on the 
child is ' ' treasure laid up in heaven, ' ' and heaven always pays compound interest, while 
hell was repudiation and bankruptcy from the beginning. Whatever may be left undone 
by Nation or States, no community that understands its own interest will evade or resist 
the utmost possible sacrifice for that public education which pays every lx>dy as no other 
outlay does in this world. And the men who should lead in this good work should be 
those whom God has blessed with abundant means. The only safety for prosperity is 
found where the mass of the people is competent to understand the relations of capital 
and labor. Communism is the pit that yawns below every state whose masses are groping 
through the perilous labyrinth of mental confusion and labor without brains. Of all 
classes in our country, the wealthy class can least afford to advocate a narrow and selfish 
policy in public education. 

And, further, we must insist that justice and interest alike demand the most generous 
and persistent expenditure for education in the very lowest strata of society. There is 
little danger that the children of the well-to-do and superior class will not enjoy the best 
opportunities; but the one class no state can afford to neglect is that for which the ma- 
jority cares little, and which, so often, has no wise regard for itself. To cast upon 
the ignorant mass of either race the responsibility of educating itself is simply to de- 
clare that a state can get on safely with such an element perpetually increasing at the 
bottom of society. It is like the foolish householder who should turn in disgust from 
the foul cesspool under his chamber window, waiting till it should purify itself, while 
he lavished his thousands on the adornment of the drawing room and the luxuries of his 
table. In due time a ghastly demon would arise from that neglected abyss and stalk 
through his palace, smiting the dearest household treasures with disease and death, and 
the glory of his mansion would be changed to a charnel house. 

And we must realize that the most valuable education we can give these ignorant 
masses, of every sort, is the most stringent training in that intelligent industry, rigid 
economy, and public spirit which will bring out their children upon the high ground of 
worthy citizenship. It will be good for the southern colored man to know that he is not 
to remain the perpetual romance of Christendom; less and less, every year, will be bol- 
stered up by charity from abroad, and more, as the years go on, will be forced to take his 
own place and make his way, in American style, toward the front. American citizen- 
ship cannot always mean prolonged childhood, or American suffrage the voting of ignorant 
masses on the most complex problem of government now set upon earth. The best friends 
of our colored people will now tell them that the highway to genuine "civil rights" is 



the open front door of solid American manhood. The intelligent, industrious, and reli- 
able portion of the freedinen, to-day, see more money and are better able to face a just 
taxation than the people of New England for the first fifty years of colonial life. The 
same habit of conscientious economy, intelligent industry, and persistent expenditure on 
the upper story of society that brought out that people, amid the stern surroundings of 
those early years, would laud our southern freedmen and the lower masses of the white 
race, in half the time, in a position that would provoke the envy of the majority of man- 
kind for education. Taxation is even more I lie privilege of the poor than the duty of the rieli; 
for no national wealth can long endure the strain of a shiftless, childish, dependent lower 
class, that swallows up every thing thrown into it as the all-devouring grave shuts out the 
light of life. 

The States of this Union where education is most glorified, and where the people are best 
satisfied with its results, are those in which a large proportion of the school fuDds are 
raised by local taxation. Massachusetts has no State school tax and distributes only a 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly from State funds, while her local assessment 
last year reached the sum of five millions seven huudred thousand dollars, raised by 
towns and cities, which assessed themselves from one to four and a half mills upon the 
dollar for schools alone. Every Northern State, with but two exceptions, raises the ma- 
jor part of its school tax by home assessment: Pennsylvania and Iowa, the whole; New 
York, Ohio, and Illinois, four dollars to one. Of the Southern States the majority en- 
deavor to support schools chiefly by State funds or general taxes, and the schools in the 
Southern States are satisfactory just in proportion to the local consent to taxation. In 
my journeying through the South, I am the perpetual witness to the sharp contrast be- 
tween two sorts of communities in the same State and even neighborhood. One town 
refuses to assess the local tax and struggles on with an inferior public school, good enough 
to destroy the private schools, too poor to satisfy anybody, and the whole educational 
problem is a muddle from which nobody can find the way out. Another town, no more 
favored in means, assesses a competent tax, establishes graded schools for both races, 
utilizes the best teachers in the place, and finds itself, in six months, in the most en- 
thusiastic state of satisfaction about the children. I have never seen little cities, of five 
thousand people, anywhere, in such a state of harmony and honest pride and happiness 
as scores of these towns, from Washington to San Antonio. 

And nowhere does " bread cast upon the waters " bring so quick return in kind as in 
a town whose people, by a heroic effort, have united to support the elementary education 
for every child. The cities of Nashville and Atlanta, in ten years, have gained in relia- 
ble population and increase of valuation enough to pay, twice over, all their expenditure 
for schools. The best "boom " now in a good southern county town is a first rate sys- 
tem of public schools, crowned bj r a good academy for secondary instruction. I could 
give the names of a score of such places where the sudden increase of superior population 
from adjacent districts has raised the values of real estate in a way to make the school 
the best financial operation heard of in a generation. 

So let all hands turn to and through the press and public speech, and especially by 
private converse between man and man, everywhere, push the fruitful idea that "the 
gods help those that help themselves ; " that taxation for the children is an investment 
in all that good men and women hold dearest in our dear land ; and that the community 
that gets in ahead with the best system of education for all, is bound to grow and become, 
if not in quantity, in the higher element of quality, a leader in the life of the new South. 

TIIE TEACHER. 

But I am told that, with the uttermost that can be expected even under favorable 
circumstances, the amount of money that can be set apart for education in the average 
southern community must be small, and the people may wellnigh be discouraged when 
they have done their best. All this I have seen, and am not discouraged myself; for the 



upshot of all I know about education is that but one thing is absolutely necessary to a 
good school among a people alive for the children. That one absolute essential is a good 
teacher; and a good teacher every school may have if the people will begin to spend at 
the soul eud and develop the material accessories therefrom. I am not indifferent to 
the great assistance that may be derived from a model school room, improved school 
books, and the various illustrative apparatus which adorns, sometimes even encumbers, 
the teacher's desk. But all this is a " body of death " till breathed upon by the spirit 
of the true instructor, and a real teacher can bring around himself at least a temporary 
body, until the people are able to give the fit clothing to his work. 

General Garfield, returning to his alma mater, Williams College, Massachusetts, which 
for many years was known chiefly by the great teaching of President Hopkins, said, at 
commencement dinner: "I rejoice with you over the new surroundings of our old col- 
lege: these beautiful buildings, large collections, ample endowments, and the improve- 
ments of this beautiful town. But permit me to say that, if I were forced to elect be- 
tween all this without Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Hopkins with only a shingle and a piece of 
chalk, under an apple tree, he on one end of an oak log and I on the other, I would say, 
My university shall be Dr. Hopkins, president and college in one." 

May the South, in its new "building for the children," learn from the dismal Ameri- 
can experience of the past, to put its first money into the teacher, and keep putting it in, 
until teachers and children persuade the people to give an outward temple fit for the 
dwelling place of the new spirit of life that has been born in their midst. 

I have in mind a picture of a noble school-house, in a prosperous northern town, going 
to wreck, with broken windows, battered doors, the walls disfigured, the yards a litter, 
and the school itself a nursery of bad manners and clownish behavior. The trouble is 
a knot of "eminent " citizens, who insist on keeping in the central room a quarrelsome 
woman, " of good family " (its goodness largely under ground), whose obstinate conceit 
and selfishness make havoc of every good influence therein, defying the master above 
stairs and snubbing the poor girl teacher below till life is hardly worth living within 
range of her discordant rule. I remember another school, in the Southland, where 
one of the gentlest of gentlemen and bravest of captains, at the close of the war, 
gathered about him a crowd of wild little colored children in a deserted house and ' ' kept 
school " so beautifully that, out of their own poverty, the colored people developed his 
dilapidated shanty into a neat and commodious school-house, where, with the help of 
the older children, he was giving instruction, in his faded old soldier clothes, such as I 
never knew until my school days had gone by. A good teacher carries his school in himself. 
His own life and daily "walk and conversation" are an hourly "object lesson" in 
morals and manners; his fulness of knowledge supplies the lack of text books; his fertile 
brain and child-like spirit blossom anew every day into some wise method of imparting 
truth or awakening faculty; and his cunning hand brings forth devices for illustration 
more effective than cabinets of costly apparatus. The best teachers tell us they can now 
manufacture all the illustrative machinery needed in a first class high school out of the 
debris that litters an ordinary attic, at a cost not exceeding two dollars and fifty cents. 
The librarian of the Department of State, at Washington, will show a set of manuscript 
school books, made by George Washington when he graduated, at thirteen, from his 
three-year, old time, Virginia school life, on the whole superior to any in use in the 
State of Virginia to-day. Nothing goes well with a poor teacher, whoever he may be, 
and all goes well when the true master or mistress of souls swings open the humblest 
school-house door. 

One of the most valuable uses of a superior teacher, especially among an uncultivated 
and poverty stricken people, is the impetus given to every human faculty in the pupils, 
aud the waking-up that comes among the entire population. I know a hundred neigh- 
borhoods where a good, womanly, Christian colored girl has gone from her academical 
•ourse at Fisk or Hampton and so toiled with the children and prevailed with their 



10 

parents that she has not only gotten over her head a good school-house, but built up 
around her a " new departure" in a Christian civilization. II' you have only money 
enough to procure the best teacher that can be had, take the teacher, gather the chil- 
dren, and begin to push for the millennium. If there is no fit interior, begin in (xod'sschool- 
house of all-out-doors. Somebody will give your new school elbow room under a tree, 
and the wondrous library of nature will spread its open leaves before you. Let the teacher 
instruct the boys to fence in a cainpus, and the girls to plant flowers therein, and make 
ready the place for building. Ere long the most godless or stupid of parents will take 
a big holiday to build you as good a house as they are able, and that humble temple of 
science may be so adorned by the genius and grace that you can coax out of thirty 
children and youth that it will become an invitation to better things. One book is 
enough in a school, if the teacher knows what to do with a book, while the Congres- 
sional Library is not enough for a pedant or a "professor," who only turns the crank 
of a memory machine. In such a school may be laid the granite foundations of a solid 
character: and thereon may be raised the strong timbers of a thoughtful and truthful 
mind, eager for knowledge, never getting enough; and over all may tower the roof of 
manly and womanly refinement, and with so little money ! For the soul of a true 
teacher, enriched by the loving confidence of a crowd of devoted children, is a mine of 
gold and silver and precious stones, out of which may be drawn infinite riches for all 
the generations of men. 

The central point in the new public school life of the South is the training of teachers 
into ample knowledge and professional skill in handling the best methods of instruction, 
organization, and discipline. What we call the "new education, ' ' as you can see it in 
more than one of your own school rooms and find it (not overmuch of it, I confess) all 
over the country, bears the same relation to the old muscular discipline, helter-skelter 
organization, and mechanical memorizing of books that the limited express train that took 
me in at New York, at 9 A. M., on a Friday, carried me, like a prince of the blood, a 
thousand miles, and delivered me in Louisville, Ky., "on the second," at 12.30 p. M., 
Saturday, bears to the stage coach that trundled from Nashville and Lexington, in my 
boyhood, with Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay for passengers, miring at every mile, 
losing wheels, breaking the harness, killing the ' ' leader, ' ' perhaps indulging in a genera] 
overturn, till its way-worn crowd was dropped into the muddy streets of the Washington 
before the flood. A great teacher finds out such methods by experience, but a good 
training school gathers up the finer methods of all good teachers and strives to awaken 
the spirit that alone can walk in the better way. 

Every large graded public school should have a master or mistress fi t to train a teacher's 
class in the upper grade. Every academy or college without a chair of pedagogy and a 
live expert in that chair is like a dish without a handle or a cart without a horse. Every 
Southern State is able to establish one genuine normal school for each race, where the 
best methods can be illustrated and from which graduates may be sent forth to important 
points. The modern institute, in the hands of skilled teachers, is a normal school on 
wheels, that may be drawn all over a State and wake up new life in its drowsiest corner. 
And, for a generation yet, our Southern States will have the finest possible material for 
the teachers of their elementary schools in the multitudes of young white women of their 
better families, with those who are coming up from its poorer classes of whites; while 
the flower of the young colored people, an army fifteen thousand strong, is now being 
trained in a score of admirable schools for the good work. Too few, by far, of the fore- 
most young men of the South will be persuaded to serve for the scanty pay of the school- 
master while the opening life of industrial enterprise combines with professional and 
public employment to lure them away. But since 1865 a whole generation of as bright 
and fine spirited young women as are found in any land have grown up, thousands of 
whom are earnestly looking for some honorable means of livelihood, and other thousands 
are asking how they can do their part in the mighty upbuilding of the new South. There 



11 

are your teachers — the best for the children — fit for any post of authority or administra- 
tion, if you will only give them a fair chance at the table of knowledge and aid them to pre- 
pare themselves to teach. Herein is an arena more splendid than the old time "field of 
the cloth of gold," where a nobler than old time chivalry may step forth, in the rivalship 
of good offices, to crown these earnest, devoted maidens and matrons with a finer wreath 
than adorned the "queen of love and beauty, " even the garland that encircles the brow of 
the gracious mistress whom the little children adore as beauty, love, and light incarnate 
in one bewitching form. 1 do not see how any rich man in the South can sleep o'nights 
until he has given to a group of these good girls the means of thus serving the State. 
The young man of culture and position who does not "go in" to help the girls in this 
their time of need has denied the good old southern faith in woman and is "worse than 
an infidel." The poorest mountain hamlet in Eastern Kentucky can raise the money, 
by some device, to send the best young woman of their region to Berea, that she may 
come back and teach the children how to excel themselves: so wonderfully has God 
provided the way for the uplifting of the lowliest through these vast areas, by bringing 
upon the finest class in the State, its promising young women, the necessity for exertion, 
and showing them the open door of the school-house, where woman in the coming gen- 
eration can do more for 18,000,000 of people than any body of women or men was ever 
given the opportunity to do before. 

NATURAL METHODS OF INSTRUCTION AND ORGANIZATION. 

The fourth essential in " building for the children " is the proper organization, grading, 
and mtthod of instruction in every department of school education. After the people have 
been aroused and money has been appropriated and competent teachers secured, we find 
ourselves on the threshold of a new difficulty, more troublesome than any other, be- 
cause more widely diffused, illusive, and slow to be overcome. That difficulty is the 
chronic delusion of an ignorant class concerning the very nature of education, and its 
perpetual interference in baffling every wise plan for the solid teaching and substantial 
discipline of children and youth. An ignorant man inevitably regards education as a 
sort of magic and a school book as a sort of charm; the bigger the subject and the more 
learned the text book, the mightier the power of incantation. Thus, when the prepared 
teacher stands before the children of such a constituency, she is confronted with a sharp 
demand for impossible results and is expected to accomplish something beyond the power 
of gods or men. Too often this illusion is not confined to the illiterate. Thousands of 
earnest young men and women are studying their brains into a tangle and breaking 
down soul and body in a wrestling match with an absurd curriculum that would bother 
Agassiz himself, and can have no other result than hopeless confusion of mind and life 
long disgust at schools and teachers in the student. I am aware what multitudes of 
ambitious spirits, parents, "professors," and children, must be "humiliated" by this 
application of God's everlasting law that runs through the universe, and should be writ- 
ten over every school-house door: Begin at the beginning; work from the known to the un- 
known; lake no step in the dark. The first condition of success in school work is to obey 
the law of the great Teacher: " Whosoever humbleth not himself and becorueth as a 
little child, the same shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." 

Of course, I teach no such nonsense as that the child in the elementary school shall be 
made a ' ' thorough scholar ' ' according to the test of the scientist. Science is not for 
' ' babes and sucklings. ' ' Rather does the true science of elementary education for chil- 
dren below the age of fourteen consist, first, in awakening the desire for knowledge ; sec- 
ond, training the body, senses, and the faculty of observation to read the open book of 
nature ; third, directing the youthful mind inward to a reverent study of human nature 
and self examination ; fourth, showing the right way to use books and illustrations of 
knowledge ; all the time working at the foundations of character that underlie all train- 
ing of the mind, with constant regard to the "gentle manners" that are the finest flower 



12 

of wisdom and goodness. All this can be done by a skilled teacher with a very narrow 
course of study, embracing the few essentials of all mental growth. To read and write 
and use the mother tongue in simple, effective communication, with voice and pen ; to 
know numbers, not alone as "ligures, " but in their relations to common things, for the 
great uses of common life ; to hold a picture of the world we live in and its relations to 
the little patch of it which we inhabit and the infinite spaces in which it is only a float- 
ing speck of dust ; to understand at least American history, with a rim of the chronicles 
of the rest of mankind ; if possible, music enough to sing out the twang of the rod, and 
drawing enough, at odd moments, to untie the hand of the child ; all the time with little 
lessons in nature knowledge and the fit care of the body, and " line upon line and pre- 
cept upon precept" of true and good and beautiful behavior — here is a program that can 
be worked in a log school-house as effectively as in your State university by any compe- 
tentteacher, provided parents are willing their children should be children and school authori- 
ties insist on keeping things down to " hard-pan ;; " for this beautiful way of teaching is so 
delightful to the chirdren that, once in it, the old order is reversed, and they must be 
whipped to be kept away from school ; and the wisest man who looks on would give all 
his honors to sit once more at the feet of that gracious schoolmistress as a little child. 
I know just what I am saying. I fully understand that this is, by far, the most diffi- 
cult problem in the new school life of the South. New England is still far behind it; 
the energetic West is only in the outer courts of the temple; but in every State I find a 
few schools that so beautifully illustrate it that I am sure the thing is possible, as all 
good things are possible, if men and women will only consent to unload themselves of 
pride, conceit, hypocrisy, and shams, and work honestly together in the love of Uod 
and man. But, easy or difficult, it matters not. Here is the everlasting law for the fit 
training of childhood and youth; and in God's law of human growth there is no ''North 
and no South," no respect of persons, bond or free, white or black, great or small, but 
all must begin at the beginning, work from the known to the unknown, and take no 
step in the dark. Unless this can be achieved or some fair approach made thereto, our 
education of all grades will turn to dust and ashes in our hands, and a generation trained 
in shams will find its way to the solemn realities of American lite only through new 
eras of buncombe, bankruptcy, and blood. 

THE SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 

Here will be found the practical solution of the vexed question of the secondary and 
higher education, over which too many of our anxious school men are talking themselves 
into a heat just now. Until this basis of all education is laid in the sensible and honest 
elementary instruction of the masses, there can be no higher education except for the 
favored few, and the secondary instruction will be a pompous "delusion and a snare." 
I am now talking, not of the high culture that may be found in the wilds of Siberia or 
the heart of Mexico, the exceptional appearance of genius and talent that everywhere 
looks out for itself, but of that education of the southern people which every true Amer- 
ican desires — except an occasional member of Congress, for whom there seems too much 
reading, writing, and arithmetic abroad already. And I repeat that only after the work 
of a full generation, down in the deep places, among the common people, will our South- 
ern States come to know the treasures that lie buried in both the races that inhabit their 
soil, like the beautiful new gem, hiddenite, first drawn out from the mysterious mount- 
ain sides of the Carolinas. 

Ten years ago the parishioners of Phillips Brooks, in Boston, planned a magnificent 
church, worthy the fame and manliness of the great preacher. The money was raised, 
and Richardson, the Louisiana boy, now prince of Boston architects, was set to draw the 
plan. There came forth from his studio a noble pile, crowned by a massive tower that 
should overlook the city and float the song of chimes over among the Middlesex Fells, 
with sweet welcome to the sailor far out at sea. But, alas! this goodly temple must be 



13 

reared on piles, driven into the shaky ground of New Boston's aristocratic Back Bay. 
Before the foundations were half laid the disgusting piles began to wabble down. 
And, finally, the great architect was compelled to razee his plan, and leave out the 
lofty magnificence on which his heart was set. So the church is there, a wonder of eccle- 
siastical architecture, with the stump of the great tower shingled with tiles, waiting for 
the underworld of the Back Bay to "materialize" to solid ground. Even so do I find 
the noblest advocates of the higher education all up and down our Southland. No lack 
of bright boys and ambitious girls in every class or in either race ; no special deficiency 
in excellent professors and university men; indeed, Harvard and Oxford and every 
wealthy northern university find the new South excellent recruiting ground for their 
must important chairs ; but when the average pupil comes up to the academy the expert 
must too often face the problem that never yet was solved: how, with one hand, to recon- 
struct a false elementary education, and, with the other, build up the secondary and 
higher culture which the student desires. 

At present, outside a score or two of cities in a region as large as Europe, all that can 
be reasonably demanded of the southern people, is to keep up their State university, their 
agricultural and normal instruction for both races, and develop the summer institute into 
a permanent institution. It is practicable, in towns or cities of one thousand people, to 
organize a class of the superior students of both races, especially for training in the art of 
teaching; and this is important in towns where there is no good academy for boys and girls. 
But the true way, as I see it, in every considerable count}' town which already has an es- 
tablished academical school for boys or girls, is that these institutions should be reorgan- 
ized for the proper work of secondary education in the true modern sense, divested of 
humbug, puff, and cram : as liberally endowed as home or outside generosity will warrant; 
filled with thorough teachers, and adj usted to take from the public graded school for white 
children all who really need superior schooling. Tuition can be made sufficiently reason- 
able, with occasional neighborly aid, to educate every promising child. Into these schools 
will be drawn an increasing crowd of pupils from the country, and in ten years every 
really good academy will be more prosperous and useful than ever before; for every little 
country school-house will be a feeder and the town graded school will make it possible 
for the academy to do solid and fruitful academical work and prepare the pupils for the 
college, which is now too often swamped in its academical grade, almost despairing of a 
real university life. This organization will serve the white people of the South for fifty 
years with an admirable system of education. 

The same work is already being done for the colored folk in the excellent institutions 
planted in every Southern State by northern benevolence, in several States subsidized by 
the legislature, already one of the most powerful factors in the elevation of the freed- 
men. These great schools are growing in the estimation of all thoughtful southern men, 
and will become the final universities for the upper strata of the seven millions of the 
colored race. Oi' course, all this will come a good deal sooner if the teachers, patrons, and 
friends of the academies and colleges can be made to see that the people's common, ele- 
mentary school is neither "godless," nor shiftless, nor a humbug in any way, when made 
the reality it now is in hundreds of southern towns and in many a favored spot in the 
open country. They will see that the people's common school is the best friend of the 
secondary and higher education, without which these will flounder on through constant 
failure, and come up cheerfully to its support. 

THE FREE LIBRAEY. 

Every country school-house, every graded school, should lay the foundation of a free 
library, in a collection of good books and periodicals, for the children and youth of the 
aeighborhood. Fifty volumes contributed by the reading families of a country school; 
a dozen good children's papers, passed in from village homes ; a donation of good reading 
to the academy; a modern endowment for the college library, is practicable everywhere. 



14 

It will be of little use to teach the four millions of our southern children and youth to 
read, if they are turned over to the mercies of the dime novel, the Devil's Weekly, and 
the diabolical side of the daily press. Every steamboat that lands on a southern river 
port discharges a swarm of rats to plague the people, and many a railroad that penetrates 
its mountain recesses, or bridges its bayous, disgorges the more mischievous pest of 
vile reading, the vilest nuisance of metropolitan life. Xow the only sure defence against 
a bad book or newspaper is to teach our children to prefer a good book and to stop the 
paper until it is clean. . And this training of a general taste for good reading cannot be- 
gin too soon and is just as important as any other function of school life. The free 
library and superior journalism are the literary university of the mass of the American 
people ; the complement of good preaching, lecturing, and public speaking of all sorts ; 
a most vital part of that grandest of all human educational agencies, the University oi 
American Life. Our wealthy southern men at home and those who go to manoeuvre! 
their millions in Wall street should be called upon to lay the foundations of good libra-H 
ries where they can best be laid in connection with the school. And I would say to the; 
northern philanthropist : Plant a generous library of good books in every growing south- 
ern community. 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION. •, 



I have but a brief space to give to the great theme of industrial education, now loom- ' 
ing above our horizon, concerning which, just now, there is more flying of chaff with J 
less outcome of wheat than on any threshing floor in America. 

My conclusion on industrial education in the South runs about in this way. To-day, \ 
as I read the statistics of southern industry, I see that somebody is prodigiously at work ' 
in every corner of its broad domain, and think that stern schoolmaster, necessity, can '■ 
be trusted, for the next generation, to wield a very sharp pitchfork about the waistband 
of every "lazy" southern man or woman, a method a good deal more effective than any 
schoolmaster's recipe of industrial education. I think laziness is not our natural vice * 
and have little patience with the people who expect American children to get their own 
living or American boys and girls to shoulder the burdens that only belong to mature 
life. But I do see that the great lack to-day of the South is that general intelligence in 
several millions of its laboring class, of both races, which always, in this country, ulti- 
mates itself in more profitable, because better, more skilful and varied industries. The 
radical help for this lack is not what is sometimes called industrial training; but it is 
the thorough elementary schooling that will wake up the mind and train the faculty of- 
the children of these illiterate and unskilled workers. The testimony of every civil- 
ized nation is to the effect that the final outcome of good schooling is a gradual expan- 
sion and uplifting of industrial life. The finest tool of all is the human mind, and the 
man who can take his own mind by the handle and turn it, in school boy phrase, "every 
which way," is the leader in every region of industrial no less than spiritual life. Book 
cramming does not make skilled workers. Sham teaching ultimates in an epidemic of 
"big head," with no corresponding growth of brain or skill of hand. But the blessed 
new education, the natural, divine, God's method of teaching and training the child, 
will send forth the southern boy and girl of a coming generation in a way that wiU 
make many a dead prophet of dismay in northern and southern graveyards turn in his 
coffin with supernatural surprise. 

TECHNICAL AND AET EDUCATION. 

Meanwhile, in every city, the leading class of women can establish schools for the 
training of servants, and, by discriminating in favor of the best, gradually get the south- 
ern household on firm foundations of skilled labor and domestic science in the kitchen. 
The State agricultural colleges can do anything the people need, as soon as the people 
understand that agriculture is as surely a science as chemistry and that country life in 



15 

the South can be made the most attractive, comfortable, wholesome, and truly refined 
of any land. Our colored universities should, more and more, become schools of skilled 
labor, and every graduate should go forth to become a missionary of skilled industry, 
wherever he lives or whatever he does. In every leading city the women's association 
for the encouragement of art should be pushed with vigor till it becomes a proper school 
for the female artisan, who will be needed before the present girls have passed the Rubi- 
con of middle life. There are more than a hundred ways, all respectable, by which a 
girl in Massachusetts can earn an honest living, and thousands of Massachusetts women, 
including teachers, are said to be earning from §1,000 to $3,000 a year. The South is to 
grow in wealth and the demand for manufactured articles, for use and ornament, more 
rapidly every year. Why should not the multitudes of its young women, now longing 
for something profitable to do, be trained at home for this profitable work ? Why should 
every western railroad groan under the army of its young men drifting from the older 
Southern States to the wilderness, while no country in the world gives fairer invitation 
to every form of useful and beautiful industry in the region of skilled activity? The 
colored people of the South have in them remarkable capabilities as operators and workers 
in ornamental manufactures, and the men who do not or will not see it seem to me like 
the farmer who turns his back on the expert who assures him that the hundred acres of 
his roughest land cover a mine of coal or iron that, fitly worked, will bring him out a 
millionaire. All this will come with the growing education of the masses. Why not 
let it come now for these people, and not wait for swarms of foreign-born workers to 
come in and reap the harvest that belongs to them V And with this will come all higher 
culture in music and literature and art; while the beautiful social life that has always 
been the pride of its upper class will gradually make its way downward and freshen and 
gladden and sweeten every southern home. 

NATIONAL AID FOB EDUCATION. 

Now, when I stand before a committee of Congress or an audience in Massachusetts or 
Minnesota, and say The Nation should help the southern people in this mighty enterprise of 
building for 4,000,000 children and youth, I speak in view of all I have said. I remember 
that in 1865 southern education was in the dust and that in 1885 its higher education 
will have been placed on its feet better than ever; the public school established in every 
State, for both races; in every State improving every year; and that, by the twentieth 
year from 1865, probably nearly $20,000,000 will be expended by the southern people, 
of their own money, on building for the children. I ask the nation to help the southern 
people because no people, under similar disadvantages, has done so big a job of helping itself. 
I ask it because it is constitutional and in the direct line of public policy, from the foun- 
dation of the Confederation that preceded the Union. Every American State has reed ved 
and used national money ; the northwestern and southwestern States, millions on millions 
in land grants for education. Every State has indorsed the policy of national aid to 
education, over and over, by receiving and using such appropriations. The common 
school fund of Kentucky was founded on the surplus revenue distributed in 1836 by the 
General Government, as was the school fund, in part, of several of the States. The only 
"humiliation " in receiving such aid would come with the improper use of the money; 
and, after the lessons of two generations, I believe the southern people know how to 
apply money for the children. Of course, such aid should only be given for a time to 
stimulate, and not take the place of, home effort and should be distributed by each State 
according to wise legislation in Congress. I believe the people will demand national aid 
for education as soon as they know what it meaus. 

THE FOUNDATIONS. 

In this way alone, as I see it, can we dry up the sources of evil doing in our land. 
Every State, city, and county in this republic has under it an open slough, through 



16 . . - 

which the all-pervading national barbarism, home and foreign, that rolls its foul and* 
festering subterranean title from Maine to Mexico, disgorges its hideous malaria. I 
never lived in any city where that malaria of barbarism would not make "the whole 
head sick and the whole heart faint," unless every good man and woman and child was 
summoned to cast in disinfectants aud toil and "pray without ceasing" to keep it 
down. I find, nowhere, a more devoted, God-fearing, and resolute baud of God's minute 
men and women standing by this opening into hell than in ever}' State and city in the 
South in which I have put my foot for the past four years. And I realize that one good 
way to shut off the fumes of the pit in Boston is to come down ' ' to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty" in New Orleans. Every brave soul in New Euglaud stands more 
erect with every blast on the bugle-horn of Haj'good and Curry. I know of no way to 
dry up the sources of every sort of folly and wickedness in our beloved land except 
God's original method to put a wise, good man in the place of every foolish, wicked 
man; to put a good mother into every family, a good minister in every church, a good 
teacher in every school. I believe the American people, North and South, are quietly 
but effectually getting out of the hands of little "statesmen," with their little patent 
right contrivances for "saving the country" by a new plank in an old platform or anew 
phrase in an old political resolution. The loud conflicts of parties and sects and classes, 
with all that makes for separation and hatred and disintegration, will still rage in the 
upper air ; but, as the years roll on, the central, solid aristocracy of mind and soul and 
hand in this great country will find itself, through all disguises, and will "settle down " 
to the second century's work of building the new Republic on foundations that cannot 
be moved, while building for the children, in every school, in every church, in every 
home in this our beloved country, before all others favored of God, beyond all other na- 
tions the hope of good men around the globe. 



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